


The Birth Of Icons

by okoriwadsworth



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-27
Updated: 2020-06-27
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:40:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24936937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/okoriwadsworth/pseuds/okoriwadsworth
Summary: Laurel Lance has had ENOUGH of being everyone's damsel in Distress. Now she's going to do something about it.
Relationships: Laurel Lance/Oliver Queen
Comments: 5
Kudos: 17





	The Birth Of Icons

Resurrection.

That was the word that stuck in her mind with every step as Dinah Laurel Lance staggered to her home just on the edge of the Glades, in Capitol Hill. She was helpless to do anything but lie there and die, if it hadn’t been for Tommy Merlyn sacrificing himself for her. She hated that feeling, and knew she would rather die than ever again feel like she was going to be the sort of person who just let things happen to them. In that moment, as she verbalized that realization to herself, she knew what she had to do. The Hood was a good start, even if he was a little violent for her tastes. But Starling City, HER city, needed more. It needed someone who could bring back the hope, inject the joy and pride into this place once again. It needed her.

And so, as she walked through her front door and saw the Glades burning behind her, Dinah Laurel Lance sat down and grabbed a notebook, a pen, and a glass of water and got to work. She couldn’t just be the sort of person who threw herself in to something, with no plan for how she wanted it done. As she drank from her water, she got angrier and more focused in equal measure. The issue wasn’t that what she was asking herself to do was hard. (Well maybe that strength training and proper nutrition bit was hard. She had always known she wasn’t as good a cook as Oliver, and she had never really lifted weights or done anything like that before.)

The problem that she was having, and she wanted to scream as she kept working through it, was that the city she had lived in all of her life NEEDED her to do this. Where were the police, either local or state, to do the job that the Hood had been doing for this whole year? Hell, why wasn’t the FBI being called in?

And, as she was thinking about it, who was this Hood? Sure, he had shown an outsized interest in protecting her and had even helped her close a couple of cases she might not have had the chance to close otherwise. And that night when he saved her life in Iron Heights, and again when Cyrus Vanch kidnapped her, it felt like it was someone she knew, someone she loved, was looking out for her. So, who was it?

Oh god. Oliver. They had been chasing after each other all year long, and this whole time, he had been trying to save them from whatever Malcolm Merlyn was planning. He had gone into a collapsing building to try and save his best friend’s life, with nothing but his bare hands. But now that she knew, that she really knew, she was faced with a first-rate legal quandary. If she said who the Hood really was, and that was what she was expected to do as an officer of the court, Oliver would go to jail for murder, at the bare minimum. But if she didn’t, she’d be spitting on the oath she took when she became an attorney. And that, she supposed, was the trap closing.

Either follow her principles, or follow the law. It felt like no great choice at all, but she knew she still had to say it out loud. She had been taught, and learned herself, that when you have a problem, you have to put a voice to it. You can’t possibly let it fester.

“I am going to give up being a lawyer. I can’t do this and serve the law.”

And with that, Laurel Lance made her choice. She went online, hoping the internet still worked and hadn’t been destroyed by Merlyn’s machinations, and put together a travel schedule. She had saved extensively, not gone on vacations, but she could never articulate what the reason was for her thriftiness. Now, in desperation and rage, she had found it. She would be the hero her city needed, and she would bring Oliver to her side.

Now, where to begin?

**_11 Months Later…._ **

\--------------------------------------------------

(Oliver Queen’s POV)

Things were so much weirder than he expected them to be. John Diggle and Felicity Smoak had flown to Lian Yu to get him back, and that whole thing was odder than he wanted to say out loud. He could read Felicity’s body language, see the way she was giggling in his presence and how her eyes widened at him shirtless, and know what she wanted. And in this exact moment, he made the decision. Felicity Megan Smoak could gawk at him until her mouth went dry, and her eyes turned red, but she would never have him. His heart, and the body that was above it, was currently not open for anyone to have it. There might come a day when he would give himself over to romance, to the love he knew John Diggle still held in his heart for Lyla Michaels. But today would not be that day. He had a city to save, so he better start.

(Laurel Lance’s POV)

Laurel Lance had taken advantage of her 11-month vacation to learn a few things about herself. Some of them weren’t great. For instance, she had spent her first 2 months at a top-of-the-line cooking school in France and realized that all of Oliver and Tommy’s jokes about her struggling to boil water were absolutely, 100 percent…. correct. This was humbling, honestly, but she got over it and ended up being near the top of the class when she was done. After that, she spent the next 3 months training under former investigators in the French Special Forces unit GIGN and in the finer points of Muay Thai and French savate. She spent her final 6 months in the Chinese mountains being trained in everything from martial arts to strength training by someone she was informed was the best unarmed fighter in the world, Lady Shiva. Turns out, this was absolutely correct. And over those 6 months, Lady Shiva put her through hell. And by the time she was done, there were things she knew about herself that were better.

She knew she could provide justice in more ways than with just a law book and her mind. She knew she was stronger, in both body and mind, than she had been. And she could see, in ways she hadn’t been able to before, the limitations of the law. There were a great many things that she could do with it, but the limits of it were never stronger for her than when she discovered that there was nothing the police of her city were able to do about Malcolm Merlyn. Fine, then.

If they couldn’t stop villains like that, she would.

(Oliver Queen’s POV)

Walking in his new office, and boy oh boy did THAT feel weird to say out loud, Oliver Queen could feel John Diggle’s eyes burning a hole through his back. First of all, he did not enjoy having been brought home from grieving for Tommy and all those he had lost just to find that someone he thought of as a brother was expecting him to go back to the work that caused him to lose another of his brothers. That was anger talking, though. On their way to Queen Consolidated, he had seen the shape the city was in. There was no way, no way at all, that Oliver Queen, vastly undertrained CEO, could solve the problem by himself. (As he thought of it though, best to make a surreptitious call to ARGUS and the SEC and have them run through this Isobel Rochev’s finances with a fine-toothed comb. Something was off about her.)

But the other problem was worse, and he needed to nip that in the bud. Dig could understand not wanting to kill unnecessarily. But Felicity seemed to want him to go right back to his old ways, and didn’t understand why he didn’t want to. It took every anger-management trick he had been taught during his time away, and the meditation he went through on Lian Yu, to not blow up at Felicity. But that wasn’t the worst part of his biggest problem. Apparently, she didn’t seem to understand the facility of a cover identity. This would have to be addressed later.

But as they kept discussing why he couldn’t go back to his old ways, John Diggle turned on the TV and they saw it. 6 hooded men, in the same style he had worn, with his sister. He didn’t hear their demands. He couldn’t. Someone had his sister.

He finished up signing papers and headed to the Foundry. There was a new suit there, and a compound bow with a full quiver of trick arrows. Somewhere out there, someone had Thea. They’d pay for thinking this was a good idea.

(Laurel Lance’s POV)

Not Thea. Thea was innocent. She had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and had the further misfortune of being a Queen. It was time for her to make her debut in Starling City, and show everyone who needed to see it that the Hood wasn’t alone in wanting what was best for Starling City.

So, she got ready. First, the pants. She had thought for a minute about wearing shorts out there, but the notion that she would be fighting crime while at the same time showing parts of herself that should only be shown off at home was not what she wanted to do. But pants were a good compromise. She would be slightly more protected from bladed weapons, but she would also fulfill her tertiary goal.

Primarily, she wanted to save Starling City. Secondarily, she wanted to show Oliver he didn’t have to do things the way he was doing them. Thirdly, she wanted to be a hero to young girls and women in Starling. She never wanted anyone to think that just because you gained some muscle and fat, and had legs like tree trunks, that you were somehow less feminine than any other woman. So, if she had to fight crime, she was going to do it to the best of her ability and never let it be said that you had to dress like a nun to do it.

So, back to the pants. They were cut to make sure she could do everything she could to fight the way Lady Shiva had trained her to, but also to be just flattering enough that she still felt like a woman when she was out there. Grabbing a long-sleeved purple t-shirt, and a domino mask she had made following instructions on the internet, it was time for Laurel Lance to make her debut. But a name. She needed a name. And then, on her fire escape, she saw something that reminded her of home, reminded her of her family and the people she loved. It was a canary, and all of a sudden, she remembered Sara having one and she remembered seeing one all throughout her travels.

There it was. She’d be the Canary. But somehow that didn’t seem enough. Well, she’d have to figure that out later. Time to rescue Thea Queen.

**_At Starling City Arena…._ **

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(Oliver Queen’s POV)

It fit, in some dark sort of way, that the abandoned Starling City Arena would be where the Hood would end up returning to the city. He had to abandon this idea of himself. Tommy would have been ashamed of him if he had stayed a killer, stayed someone who didn’t try to save lives. But he couldn’t quite figure out how to make the move. There was that Green Arrow name Malcolm Merlyn had suggested last year, that felt good. But right now, wasn’t the time. Right now, he had to find Thea and then make her captors pay.

Finally, he saw his baby sister by the funnel cake stand. But before he could get there, he saw someone else rushing in and cutting her down. Wait, was that…. Was that Laurel? It had to be. He had **_enjoyed_** watching her run since he was old enough to be intrigued by girls. There was no way anyone moved like her, and he was desperately trying to figure out what this could mean. Bottom line was that everything he was seeing was a new development, and one he’d have to look into further.

At that exact moment, of course, Thea’s captors showed up and were chasing after Laurel. When he saw it, a rage flew over him he could not comprehend and he started firing arrows from his elevated position. Quite a few of them were trick arrows, cable arrows and tranquilizer arrows being the most popular. But there were some people who didn’t deserve the freedom of just being tied up or knocked out. And for those people, they got an arrowhead through the hand or in the foot. No one would dare even think of the possibility of kidnapping Thea Dearden Queen after word got out about this. He was sure of it.

(Laurel Lance’s POV)

Oliver was white-hot angry. She could tell from the way he was firing his arrows. Part of her research had been in the field of defensive archery, namely figuring out how to time clustered arrow shots and either block or defend them. And right now, she could tell that if not for that training, she’d be dead. Absolutely dead. He was firing arrows like he wanted to kill not just the person he was aiming at, but their parents. This was the stuff she worried about with Oliver under that hood. She didn’t want to be close to a monster, to partner with a man who could do as much harm as he was capable of just for the sake of vengeance.

But, as she dispatched the kidnappers Oliver hadn’t put arrows in, it dawned on her that making him see the city didn’t need someone it was afraid of, but someone it trusted and believed in, was just as vital as saving the city herself. Sure, if she really gritted her teeth and bit down, she could do the long slow process of saving Starling herself. But if they did it together, they could rebuild it into something nobler, something filled with hope, and joy, and families again.

And as the SCPD showed up, far too late to do anything but clear the scene and interview the kidnappers who were still conscious, Laurel left. She had to catch Oliver and tell him.

(Oliver Queen’s POV)

He had detailed plans for every major building in Starling City. One never knows if the day will come when he’d have to raid Memorial Stadium, and fight from the top to the bottom. This meant he knew exactly where one would have to exit the Starling City Arena to avoid being found out by the cops.

So, when Laurel Lance exited exactly where he knew she would, the Hood was waiting for her with disapproval radiating off of every pore. How dare she put herself in danger like this? It was so reckless, so completely beyond anything he ever wanted her to do. And then, despite himself, he looked at her. Actually looked.

And when he did, he felt a wave of pure emotion and longing hit him like a freight train running down the freeway at 100 miles an hour. What had he been thinking? He couldn’t have rejected her for this, any more than he could have rejected John Diggle for it. Laurel was, is, and always would be the path to his true life, to the person he always knew he could be. If she had made the decision, either by Tommy’s death or some other factor, to join him in this life he would do what she deserved. She would be welcomed, and supported. And he knew the best way to do that.

(Laurel Lance’s POV)

This could not possibly be happening. There was no way this was going on.

The Hood was unmasking in front of her. And while she, intellectually, understood that the Hood was Oliver Queen, it was a whole different kettle of fish to see him with a compound bow in his hand, and a quiver of arrows on his back. She couldn’t believe it. He was doing this. He was letting her into his life.

So, she would return the favor. Off came the domino mask.

\------------------------------------------------------------------------------

For what seemed like hours, they stood in front of each other. Each one too stunned, too filled with love and hope and fear and every kind of emotion, to do anything but stand there.

Finally, Oliver said the first word. To anyone else, it would have seemed hollow. But to them, who knew the subtext that was literally soaking every consonant and vowel, it was perfect.

“Do you want to talk?”

“Yes. We probably should.”

And with that little two-sentence conversation, the two heroes of Starling City united. Over coffee and frittatas, they would plan. Oliver would take the name of the Green Arrow, seeing Laurel’s wisdom in the idea of being something more than a destroyer. For her part, Laurel understood the value of being properly prepared and joined Oliver in his bunker where she could train and get proper equipment. From that day through the time when their mission finally ended, they were there for each other. As partners, lovers, parents, and finally…. icons.


End file.
